287403 - Plugins don't work correctly all the time.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 273785

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[John Kubiatowicz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050217
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050217

Since installing 1.8b1 (I was using 1.7.5), I have had a variety of weird plugin
behavior.  After reinstalling  both Adobe Acrobat 6.0 (update 6.0.3) multiple
times and 1.8b1 twice, I am now down to just annoying behavior.

At this moment, everytime I start a new instance of mozilla 1.8b, I am unable to
click on a .pdf file and have the plugin come up.  Instead, it launches the
Acrobat helper application in a separate window.  This behavior seems to persist
until I access a web page that I built that uses a bunch of JavaScript.  At that
point, the adobe plugin starts working.  (Weird initialization problem?).

Worse, is the behavior I was seeing before installing multiple times: on
clicking on a .pdf link, I would get a complaint like:

   Cannot access c:\temp\xlkd23498.pdf  Please try again or contact server
administrator.

This error message is not verbatim, since I cannot currently reproduce it.  Note
that the temp filename would change.  And -- there was a 0-length temporary file
of the same name constructed just before the error popup came up. It was deleted
as soon as I clicked on the "ok" button.  Note also that the server was clearly
contacted about the proper filename and responded with an ok status.  Thus,
something weird had happened after contacting the server.

Note that these types of problems tended to come and go (even returning after a
while).  They also affect the attempt to click on attachments in email and
attempts to download other types of links from web pages.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start new mozilla
2. Click on .pdf link.  Problems always happen.
3.

Actual Results:  
After my first install (over previous 1.7.5 install), I would always get that
weird complaint about c:\temp\tempfilename.  Now, after reinstalling Acrobat 6.0
and Mozilla 1.8b1, it simply launches an external helper application rather than
the plugin.

Expected Results:  
View .pdf as a plugin.

As I mentioned above, I installed this over an existing 1.7.5 installation.  The
weirdness with helper applications (and plugins in general) are problematic
enough taht I may go onto the new 1.7.6.  

Note that neither Mozilla 1.7.5 nor Firefox 1.0 have this problem.

I am marking this problem as major because there are times when I have had to go
to Firefox or IE in order to view attachments in email/view pdf files.  Very
annoying.l

Comment 1

[John Kubiatowicz]

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b)
Gecko/20050217
> Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b)
Gecko/20050217

> At this moment, everytime I start a new instance of mozilla 1.8b, I am unable to
> click on a .pdf file and have the plugin come up.  Instead, it launches the
> Acrobat helper application in a separate window.  This behavior seems to persist
> until I access a web page that I built that uses a bunch of JavaScript.  At that
> point, the adobe plugin starts working.  (Weird initialization problem?).

Ok.  To amend, it appears that the mere fact of going to a page with HTML on
another server from my home server (my home page is
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron) can cause the plugins to start working. 
This is still reproduceable but very weird.

Note that one of the things that I did between installing 1.8b1 the first and
second times was go to the helper-application preferences window and delete the
entry for "application/postscript".  There was an entry there -- not sure where
it came from.  Perhaps that accounts for the change from total failure (see
weird behavior mentioned above with respect to temp files) to nolonger executing
the plugin initially.  I am not sure what that helper application entry was
pointing to.

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Fixed sometime back in February....

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 273785 ***